SAU 16 to see a spike in special-needs students

EXETER — The projected cost of educating a growing number of "medically fragile" special-needs students in SAU 16 has jumped roughly $1,000,000, according to Superintendent Michael Morgan.

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By Jeff McMenemy

seacoastonline.com

By Jeff McMenemy

Posted Dec. 27, 2013 at 2:00 AM

By Jeff McMenemy
Posted Dec. 27, 2013 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

EXETER — The projected cost of educating a growing number of "medically fragile" special-needs students in SAU 16 has jumped roughly $1,000,000, according to Superintendent Michael Morgan.

"It's mostly new students coming into the cooperative," Morgan said during a recent interview about the projected increase for the 2014-15 school and fiscal year. "It's basically kids with more involved special-education needs coming from the fifth grade into the middle school or coming into the cooperative from outside the district."

Morgan said the number of students in the cooperative with more extensive needs has jumped from about three kids to a projection of 20 in 2014-15.

Federal law requires school districts to pay to educate special-needs students who live in their districts, and in the case of the cooperative middle and high schools, that's anyone who lives in Brentwood, East Kingston, Exeter, Kensington, Newfields and Stratham.

Even if voters in March reject the district's proposed budget, school officials would still have to pay for the special-education students, Morgan said.

"We're required by law to do that," Morgan said. "And we're trying very, very hard to keep kids in the SAU, rather than sending them to outside facilities, which are even more expensive."

A power point presentation given to the Exeter Cooperative School Board at a recent meeting noted that medically fragile special-needs students have significantly more needs that have to be addressed.

They include one-on-one or two-on-one paraprofessional support, hygiene and toileting support, intensive speech and language instruction and tube feeding.

The Newmarket School District recently experienced a similar rise in medically fragile special-needs students and had to hire five new paraprofessionals and a nurse's assistant for the Newmarket Elementary School to deal with the increase.

Nancy Wells, the president of the New Hampshire School Nurses' Association and a clinical assistant professor of nursing at the University of New Hampshire, said at the time while the number of kids with severe medical needs differs from district to district, school nurses statewide are seeing more students with serious medical needs.

The procedures school nurses are being asked to perform are often more elaborate and more time consuming.

"There's children who need catheterization. There's kids in wheelchairs who need to be toileted," Wells said. "Sometimes they need oxygen. We have kids who have had several medical issues and survived, and now they're coming to school."